Canon?.. wtf?

https://petapixel.com …contains-stolen-elements/

Pardon me if this was posted already and /or if this is in wrong section.

I beleive the was part of fstoppers series ?
I know I've seen the pic before in his vids

It is much easier and cheaper to grab a free image off a website than to solicit and review images from Canon users. Let alone PAY for one of those images.

It's not about the photographer, photography, or even the image any more. It's about corporate profits. Engineers used to conceive and design better cameras and tell the marketing department what to work with. No longer. It's the marketing departments that tells engineers what new feature or increased megapixel they need for their next marketing campaign.

It's not just Canon, either. It's Canon, Nikon, Fuji, and beyond.

And it's not just cameras. It's cars, it's everything, it's health care. Doctors used to do what they needed to do to make people well. No longer. It's the corporate bean counters that tell doctors what they can and can not do.

The sooner you realize the corporate world doesn't care about you - that they only care about their profits - the less stress-filled your travels thru life will be. And the less frequently you will succumb to the latest BS from corporate marketing departments.

They took an image off a free site. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The fault actually lies with the person that loaded up the image to the site in the first place. Also the photo was edited, which starts to move into the area of creative edits on somebody else's work. Who cares if they pay a photographer for pictures or go to a public royalty-free site to grab photos from THEIR EQUIPMENT. Canon doesn't engineer photographers, they engineer equipment. Therefore wherever they can pull images, legally, is just fine. If you want to get mad at the general industry, get mad at lawyers and those that go to litigation for a fast buck and create frivolous suits.

I don't get all the anger toward Canon, for petes sake. They did absolutely nothing wrong here.

Just looks like more clickbait, like most anything sensationalized on those sites. Just National Inquirer for photographers...

Using a partially fuji pic to promote canon is Ok?

I get the whole grabbing free pics off the internet, especially as it was taken from a site that was for such use..

But it wasnt fully a canon picture.
(At very least the sky wasnt )

Am I the only one to be puzzled what the big deal is here? I completely fail to see the relevance of the story and to me this looks like one of this storm in a glass outrage about nothing? What am I missing?

drmaxx wrote in post #18540003
Am I the only one to be puzzled what the big deal is here? I completely fail to see the relevance of the story and to me this looks like one of this storm in a glass outrage about nothing? What am I missing?

The part that made me go "wtf?"..
Is that the owner of the photo has come out and said he never gave permission AND.. that its not a photo taken with a canon camera but a Fuji.

So instead of canon saying "oops my bad , we were under the impression it was a canon photo because someone falsely represented it"

In which case this would have all been a non issue , but

They are saying no its not fuji , it's from a canon.., you can tell as there is evedincr of "seasonal changes"

(Evem though if you look at pics every detail of every cloud is identical , including the plane )

That's the part that makes me say wtf?

rantercsr wrote in post #18539991
Using a partially fuji pic to promote canon is Ok? . . .

Of course not. But, for me, the fuss is way overblown.

Again, there are way bigger issues to deal with than worry about misrepresented photos on the web... Canon didn't break any laws or did anything unethical, and maybe a bad case of judgment in the responses to the "uproar", but who doesn't have lapse in judgement? Hardly news worthy imo. I am immensely more interested in what Canon is doing in R&D and what we can expect from new gear in the future.

TeamSpeed wrote in post #18539971
They took an image off a free site. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

There is something wrong with that. Not morally or ethically, of course, but there is still something wrong.

Why is it wrong? . Because Canon's objective should be to bolster the public's perception of their brand. . They should use marketing to set themselves apart and to give people the impression that they are this world-class corporation that does everything in a superlative manner.

In this case, their marketing efforts give people the impression that they are cheapskates who are not above doing things in a half-assed manner on occasion.

In this case, Canon didn't get it just right. . They got it wrong.


.

TeamSpeed wrote in post #18539971
....

I don't get all the anger toward Canon, for petes sake. They did absolutely nothing wrong here.

Just looks like more clickbait, like most anything sensationalized on those sites. Just National Inquirer for photographers...

It seems what they "did wrong" is all about the response once the mistake was revealed.

I think that once the truth was revealed to them, they should have taken steps to rectify rather than to continue to except the lie that the uploader was propagating. They are either blind, or just don't care. Neither is exactly what you want from a promotional standpoint, which is the entire point of having a facebook page.

Sure it's clickbait, but on the other hand, I am all for stupid, insensitive, and disconnected from reality being exposed. Even if it's via pointing and laughing.


I'm, not sure how a small online series of posts makes this "overblown". There is no "tempest" We are reading about it here in a our little photography bubble, it isn't on any of the other places I visit, hasn't been delivered to me in any other form. Only this Photography related forum. It's not like it's being run on FOX news, NPR or even being "re-tweeted" a million times.

Tom Reichner wrote in post #18540116
There is something wrong with that. Not morally or ethically, of course, but there is still something wrong.

Why is it wrong? . Because Canon's objective should be to bolster the public's perception of their brand. . They should use marketing to set themselves apart and to give people the impression that they are this world-class corporation that does everything in a superlative manner.

In this case, their marketing efforts give people the impression that they are cheapskates who are not above doing things in a half-assed manner on occasion.

In this case, Canon didn't get it just right. . They got it wrong.

.

Word! (or "QFT" etc.. )

Marketing material is taken from all sources in a big business. Often the free sources are always exhausted first for material used in marketing. That is what we get for expecting double digit gains in our portfolios year after year, those profits come from less outsourcing of marketing material and more from what might be considered free, especially in photo and graphics areas.

What exactly was Canon promoting, I couldn't find that? All it says is that the picture was taken from a 1D4, a long deceased model in Canon's lineup, one that generates zero revenue for Canon.

I still believe that companies, even Canon, aren't going to go out every single time to pay photographers to get some test shots for them to promote models, they are going to temper that activity with finding what might be readily available in both the public domain space and possible what others might have posted to gallery sites and approach them for an arrangement. I know what we do within our own company, and we aren't exactly small. We have the folks that can do the graphic arts (myself and a couple of others, as well as some photographers) but invariably, it is from public domain that we pull our material. So in our case, we don't even use the skills of the employees, because their time is better spent on other projects that actually derive revenue. We have used marketing companies locally in the past however, but they also pull from public domain or their subscription service sources for material.

This is pretty minor an issue, the real issue is the person that uploaded a photo that was at least partially not his to a free site. All Canon had to do was offer an apology that in their search for photos by owners for a marketing project, they pulled what they thought was a public domain photo, but unfortunately what was uploaded was an edited merge of somebody else's work.

Now, this is news! What self-respecting photographer would deliver these results? They surely came from an MILC camera and post processed with MS Paint!

TeamSpeed wrote in post #18541229
Marketing material is taken from all sources in a big business. Often the free sources are always exhausted first for material used in marketing.

I don't think that this was 'marketing' - some grey boss decided that Canon needs to be cool and be present in social media. He calls his drone and tells him:
Boss: "Go create a Canon Facebook/Twitter/xxx account. Keep it light, attractive and lively. Goal is 50'000 follower after the first month."
Drone: "What's the budget?"
Boss: "Budget? Are you crazy? My daughter has a great FB account and has no budget. You don't need a budget."
Drone: "O.k., I'll pass some of my responsibilities to Drone 2 and get going?"
Boss: "What? No way. Do you think my daughter can get off school for running FB? - Off you go, you'll manage."

TeamSpeed wrote in post #18541229
What exactly was Canon promoting, I couldn't find that?

Exactly, that's my point.

Everyone is trying to save a buck so when the promotion department at Canon wants a photo for an ad on PR or whatever, instead of paying someone to go out and get a specific shot with Canon gear and all they pay someone to sit at a computer and look for public domain photos from free sites. Problem is, as we all know, some photos are heavily edited and then posted on the shallow web (sorry for the pun, been exploring the deep web lately). Why anyone would change the exif data to change it from Fujifilm to Canon is beyond me unless it was a Canon employee who liked the photo and said, 'lets use this one. I can change the exif data'. I don't know...

drmaxx wrote in post #18541286
I don't think that this was 'marketing' - some grey boss decided that Canon needs to be cool and be present in social media. He calls his drone and tells him:
Boss: "Go create a Canon Facebook/Twitter/xxx account. Keep it light, attractive and lively. Goal is 50'000 follower after the first month."
Drone: "What's the budget?"
Boss: "Budget? Are you crazy? My daughter has a great FB account and has no budget. You don't need a budget."
Drone: "O.k., I'll pass some of my responsibilities to Drone 2 and get going?"
Boss: "What? No way. Do you think my daughter can get off school for running FB? - Off you go, you'll manage."

Yup.

Out of what is surely tens of thousands of images shared annually, its surprising this doesn't happen more often. Their response could have been better, but I suspect it was made by the same low level social media employee, or third party social media management group.